Minutes after Wednesday’s devastating blast at a fertilizer plant, the phone started ringing at West’s best-known landmark, the Czech Stop deli and bakery. It’s a good thing they’re open all night, because the calls kept coming.

“I had a guy call this morning from Australia. I had Czech Republic newspapers on the phone last night and today,” said Barbara Schissler, president of what might be the most famous road food stop in Texas. “And we’ve had so many of our customers call just to see if we’re OK.”

For 30 years, the punishment for getting between North and Central Texas has been a wretchedly boring drive along Interstate 35. The reward is Czech Stop, which offers a bounteous selection of sandwiches, sausages and baked goods. It’s most famous for its kolaches, a kind of Czech doughnut with delicious sticky goo in the middle in a staggering array of flavors.

As the town’s best-known business — to the outside world, at least — it became a kind of information central after the explosion. Schissler said the store’s employees were unharmed, but some lost their houses and everything they own.

Like everyone else who lives there, Schissler is grief-stricken for the town: “One of our firemen was in here a while ago, and he said, ‘Nobody ever needs to see the things that I’ve seen since last night.’”

Its proximity to the freeway — like its location, in an earlier era, on the railroad — has kept West a reasonably prosperous small town. It’s a bedroom community for Waco and a commercial center for the surrounding miles of corn and cotton and soybean farms.

Like a lot of small towns, it can seem insular — “If you don’t know what your child is doing, your neighbor does,” Schissler said.

Some of the older folks still speak the Czech language their ancestors brought from Europe a century ago. It’s the kind of town where everybody knows everybody else and can likely as not trace a relational tie through an aunt or an in-law or a third cousin.

In a disaster, that’s a source of great comfort.

An old friend who grew up in West, Fort Worth Catholic Diocese spokesman Pat Svacina, was unsurprised to hear that the Red Cross shelter that opened Wednesday night didn’t see much traffic.

“As soon as it happened, the schools in Penelope and Abbott had their gyms open,” Pat said, naming two little country crossroads towns nearby. “These are people whose great-grandparents and grandparents migrated from Czechoslovakia — they started with nothing and they helped each other out. That’s their tradition.”

If food is one of the manifestations of West’s traditional roots to the rest of Texas and beyond, the other is polka music. Every Labor Day, West hosts the wildly popular Westfest, a Czech-flavored twist on traditional wurstfests that draws revelers from all over.

Carl Finch, the lead and heart of Denton neo-polka superstars Brave Combo, says the town is a kind of adopted home to the band. Brave Combo has been a headline act at every Westfest since 1979.

“It’s family to us,” he said. “We know the policemen. We know the people in the stores. So many of the volunteers at Westfest are members of the volunteer fire department there — I’m just holding my breath to hear bad news.”

No matter how bad it is, Finch has already begun talking to other musicians about possibly staging a benefit for victims of the disaster.

“How could we not do something to help? All over the country, we run into people who say, ‘I saw you play in West,’” he said. “It doesn’t surprise me when somebody in New York City comes up and says, ‘I know you from every year in West.’”

Like Finch, my friend Pat — who is a former Dallas Morning News reporter — is waiting for bad news. His cousin lost her home, Pat said. The town funeral director, who handled services when Pat’s mother died last year, was badly injured in the blast.

And as of midday Thursday, a distant cousin who is a member of the West volunteer fire department, had not been accounted for.

Pat predicts that West’s strong cultural traditions and family will get it through this crisis.

“We’ll be there, and we’ll help each other out,” he said, unconsciously identifying with his boyhood home even though he has lived in Tarrant County for decades.

“The Czech language may be dying out, but the Czech heritage isn’t. The traditions are still strong.”